Namratha Rao (India)

nam rao
MSt in English
In my year as an Ertegun Scholar I completed the MSt in English (1550 – 1700). I worked variously on Shakespeare and early modern ways of knowing, the difficulties of editing Thomas Traherne, and Wordsworth’s poetry of self-involution. My dissertation focused on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the idea of the ‘human’. Ertegun House gave me brilliant mentors and friends, the financial support to write, convene graduate seminars and organise a conference, and a wonderful work space.

Life After Ertegun House

In Autumn 2021, I joined the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York as a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature. I completed my BA (2014), MSt (2015), and DPhil (2019) degrees at the University of Oxford. From 2019-21, I held a lectureship in English at Hertford College, Oxford, where I taught approaches to literature and literature from 1550-1700.

 

My research focuses on literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular interests in allegory, poetry and poetics, and theories and histories of embodiment, affect, medicine and science. My work has been supported by the Ertegun Fund and the Clarendon Trust, and I hold visiting fellowships at the Osler and Huntington Libraries in North America. At York, I teach modules on early modern literature and culture and premodern medical humanities at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.